


Children of Time

by IamShadow21



Series: Children of Time [1]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Siblings, Childhood, Family, Female Protagonist, Gen, Jack's Missing Years, Jossed, Missing Scene, Origins, POV Female Character, POV River Song, Pre-Immortal Jack, Siblings, Time Agency
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-03
Updated: 2009-02-03
Packaged: 2017-12-16 18:43:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/865345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IamShadow21/pseuds/IamShadow21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s born into a family that’s half what it used to be but still struggling to carry on, like a lightning-split tree.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Children of Time

**Author's Note:**

> Have you noticed that many, many, many Who 'verse episodes are set in the 51st century? Just me, then? Oh well, carry on.
> 
> Any vague wonkiness about the timelines of the subjects involved should be put down to the general wonkiness of timelines of time travelling personages; ie, all three people in this story not making a living harvesting seaweed.
> 
> Also, my first time posting gen fic in this fandom. Always an experiment.
> 
> EDIT 27/4/10: Because there's been a lot of River!hate going on, I felt that I should dust off this fic and show it off. Why? Because River is awesome, and there's too much hating of female characters by women in fandom.
> 
> Refers to stuff from Who Season One Eps9 and 10(The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances), Season Four Eps 8 and 9(Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead) and Torchwood Season Two Ep 5(Adam).

She’s born into a family that’s half what it used to be but still struggling to carry on, like a lightning-split tree. Her father’s ashes are sprinkled on the sands six months before she takes her first breath, and the brother closest to her in age is a ghost in their home whose name is never spoken. 

When their mother is sleeping one day, her older brother loads up some old holovids, pulls her onto his lap and points to the screen, whispering their names in a reverent hush. She’s filled with questions, brimful, but there’s a look on his face that’s almost like the one their mother wears most days, and she knows to just stay quiet, to watch and listen closely. That’s her father, alive, tall, like her older brother, and that’s her mother, smiling, rosy cheeked. Her older brother, young and small, not teenaged and angry at the world, is playing with her missing brother, a tiny whirlwind of movement, his hair wavy and tangled, bouncing just above his shoulders.

Even though her older brother is gripping her hand so tightly it hurts, she doesn’t complain. She just records everything she sees with her brain, like a camera, so that she can look at her family any time she wants to.

***

She’s not much older when her family breaks again. There’s a lot of shouting and stomping about, and she hides away from it in her room. Finally, her mother starts crying, and her older brother slams the outer door with a bang.

Late that night, when the moons are high up and bright, he sneaks into her room and tells her that he’s going away, that he’s been recruited for the Time Agency.

“Everyone else thinks it’s wonderful, but she just doesn’t understand,” he says. “I _have_ to go. I’ll never get off this rock if I don’t.”

He promises to write and kisses her goodbye, before climbing out of her window with a rucksack full of his belongings.

***

For a while, she thinks she hates her older brother. Her mother spends the days at work and the evenings softly crying, and she hates that he hurt her mother like that, and ran away and left them alone.

Without him around, she spends her days running wild on the dunes, her skin pink with sunburn and tight with salt, her legs scratched by scrub. She pokes sticks into holes inhabited by crabs and snakes and crawlers, gets lost and manages to find her way home after dark, and even once waits out a sandstorm in the shelter of an overhang. Her teeth crackle unpleasantly on the grit in the air, and she’s washing the sand out of her hair for days afterwards, but the lightning striking pink and green and violet over the frothy sea is the most incredible sight of her young life. 

When she gets back, she realises that her mother never even noticed she was gone.

***

The stone is flat, circular and spiral patterned, smooth on one side where it’s been sliced to show the segmented innards, rough and ridged on the other.

 _It’s a fossil_ her older brother’s message says. _An ancient shellfish, thousands and thousands of turns older than you or me, from a sea on another world._

She holds the ammonite on the palm of her hand, her nose almost touching it, her eyes taking in every minute detail. She sniffs, expecting salt and seaweed, but only discovers a chalky, dusty scent, powdery and dry. Holding it, she thinks she might just feel the immensity of all those turns, herself just the tiniest mote, just a speck in a galaxy of stars.

She doesn’t run on the dunes the next day, or the day after that, but instead opens up her long neglected learning pod and immerses herself in it, reading up on fossils and prehistoric animals and plants.

She sends her older brother a message, asking him for a dinosaur egg. He sends her an absolutely _enormous_ waspy-looking thing trapped in a honey-gold nugget of amber instead.

She forgives him.

***

When two grim Agents turn up on their doorstep, her mother instantly presumes the worst. Her brother hasn’t been in contact for a while, now, and his last message home was short and guarded, as though he didn’t want to (or couldn’t) say anything about himself.

The Agents, however, don’t tell them her brother is dead. Instead, they start asking a lot of questions about her brother. When did they last speak to him? Do they know where he is? Who he might be with? Her mother doesn’t know. Of course she doesn’t. She doesn’t reply to her brother’s messages.

“What about the girl?” one of the Agents says. “Does she know anything?”

The other Agent puts on what he obviously thinks is a winning smile and asks her.

“He sends me presents,” she answers. “Special things. From other worlds.”

Both Agents’ eyes light up, like she’s told them a big secret, and they ask her to show them her brother’s gifts. However, their faces fall after they see her fossils and push some buttons on their wrist straps.

“They’re just rocks,” one of them remarks in disgust.

“They are _not_ ,” she retorts.

The Agents ignore her, and leave.

Late that night, when her mother’s asleep, she sends her brother a message.

_Men came looking for you. They were rude. They called my fossils ‘just rocks’. They were stupid._

She’s watching the moons floating high in the sky, almost touching, when she gets a reply.

_Of course they were stupid. Nobody’s smarter than you!_

It makes her smile.

_Did you do something bad?_ she sends back.

She falls asleep before she gets an answer. In the morning, there are just three words waiting for her.

_I hope not._

***

Though she forgave her brother quickly enough, she doesn’t fully understand his decision to leave until she reaches her own majority and begins chafing at the restrictions of living in a tiny, pioneer settlement on a planet mostly devoid of sentient life. She used to love the sand and the sea and the moons floating overhead, and now she feels like she’s suffocating.

Her mother is fighting her every step of the way. With the last of her children preparing to leave, her mother finally sees the death of the dream she has clung to for so many years. There will be no dynasty of curly haired grandchildren born for her mother to dote on while she grows old and content in the shade of the dunes. No mansion built of the golden local stone, overlooking the water. No family of hers left to harvest and process the mineral rich seaweed that her father was sure would mean his fortune. Just a lonely, bitter woman, still grieving for a husband long dead and a son long gone, while her other children fly as far away from their birthplace as they can.

She feels like she should feel guiltier than she does, but when the landing pod’s rockets fire to take them up through the atmosphere of her home planet, all she can feel is a giddy sense of relief.

***

She’s been studying for six Earth months when she gets her first message from her brother since leaving home.

_Back on the straight and narrow. A couple of people knocked some sense into me. If I’m with them long enough, maybe they’ll even make me like myself again._

She knows better than to ask where he is, who he’s with, or what he’s doing. Instead, she swallows down the lump in her throat and sends a reply.

_You’re a good person. Even if you forgot that, for a while._

_Thank you_ , he says back, and she can see him smiling when she closes her eyes, small and carefree, dancing on the sands.

***

It’s not exactly what she expected for her first archaeological dig. Certainly, nothing in her mentor’s research suggested there would be so many tentacles involved, but that’s rather a moot point, seeing as said mentor is currently being digested by the owner of the tentacles.

She’s debating the merits of a broken pottery vase over a rather worm-eaten shelf as potential weaponry when a very skinny man in a long brown coat steps past her and squints inquisitively at the monster.

“Oh, aren’t you _beautiful!_ ” he enthuses, as though it’s a puppy, not a ravening, man-eating beast.

Later, after the failed negotiations, explosions, violently magenta alien guts, and more running than she’s done since she left her home planet several turns ago, the man shows her to a bathroom in his spaceship where she can clean off the worst of the slime.

“Oh! How rude of me. I completely forgot. We haven’t been introduced,” he exclaims. “I’m the Doctor.”

“River Song,” she replies, holding out one rather gummy hand.

The Doctor looks reluctant to take it, but when he does, his grasp is firm.

“Welcome aboard the TARDIS, River Song,” he says, and his voice is gentle and warm, even if his eyes are strangely sad.


End file.
